Monitoring soil disturbance on salvaged areas within the mountain pine beetle infestation using digital imagery

Abstract

There is a concern that the accelerated timber harvest in the mountainpine beetle epidemic area of British Columbia (BC) could compromiselong-term forest productivity if soils are unduly disturbed.Consequently, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural ResourcesOperations (MFLNRO) developed a protocol using ground- and image-basedmethods to assess the status of the forest soil resource in part of theBC Forest and Range Evaluation Program (FREP). Although this protocoluses high-resolution aerial imagery, the MFLNRO is also collectingbeetle imagery at a smaller scale for detecting and monitoring. For thisevaluation, we use a combination of ground- and imagery-basedassessments as developed for FREP within the BC Interior Plateau. Wedetermined that low-resolution data are useful and are sufficient fordetecting and measuring the extent of roads and landings. Areas occupiedby landslides, erosion, drainage diversion, inordinate disturbance, orroadside work areas can be captured on remote-sensed images with spatialresolution greater than 2.5 m. However, based on this review andprevious work, aerial photographs in 10-cm pixel size are best suited toreveal less evident harvesting-related soil disturbance. (c) TheAuthors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole orin part requires full attribution of the original publication, includingits DOI.